Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  The President now took to rising at six o’clock in the morning, at which time he would have a small sandwich and a cup of coffee from a plate and thermos that had been set on a small table outside his bedroom. Then he and Edith (and a Secret Service agent) would go to a course for at least an hour of golf. They would be home in time to breakfast together at eight o’clock sharp and then go to his study together to check “the Drawer,” the bin in his desk in which all documents demanding immediate attention had been placed. Edith would sort the papers, placing those requiring his signature before him and blotting each as she set down the next item. Time permitting, he discussed each document with her. By nine o’clock, stenographer Charles Swem would arrive; and Edith would sit close by, listening to Woodrow dictate replies to his mail, marveling at “the lucid answers that came with apparently no effort from a mind so well-stored.”

  Edith would then leave to tend to housekeeping and social matters along with her own mail, which she dictated to her secretary, Edith Benham. From the big window seat at the end of the west hall, she could see her husband signal to her, as he left the study, to accompany him to the West Wing. If possible, they would stroll through the garden; if not, they would grab the few minutes together walking directly to the Oval Office. Edith tried to schedule her appointments to coincide with his so that they could reconvene for lunch, which they generally reserved for each other. They did not discuss business over meals. The President spent two afternoons a week in Cabinet meetings; the other days were filled with individual Secretaries or legislators. Whenever possible, Edith and Woodrow would cram in a round of golf or a motor ride before dinner; afterward Wilson tended to his most serious work, assessing problems and addressing them on paper—confidential correspondence, speeches, or policy papers, which he would type himself. Edith would sit up with him, decoding top secret memoranda. They often worked past midnight, until he might say, “You don’t know how much easier it makes all this to have you here by me. Are you too tired to hear what I have written?” Beyond their personal bliss, the rest of the world steadily darkened.

  Trouble had been mounting within the War Department for months, as its disgruntled Secretary, Lindley M. Garrison, increasingly found himself at odds with his boss. Garrison’s views about preparedness and international intervention had long been more aggressive than the President’s: Garrison favored a large and permanent conscripted Army, while Wilson preferred a smaller armed force with a large, trained reserve of volunteer citizens at the ready. In truth, the conflict ran deeper than that, as Garrison believed Wilson had “little or no interest in the Army and had rather a disparaging attitude toward it.” Within less than a week of Wilson’s return from the Midwest, Garrison resigned.

  Wilson wasted no time in wiring Newton D. Baker—the former Mayor of Cleveland who had, in fact, refused Wilson’s prior offer to serve as Secretary of the Interior. In proffering this post, the President told him, “It would greatly strengthen my hand.” The men had met when Baker was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins and Wilson was lecturing there. He accepted his former professor’s offer and appeared in Washington three days later. After Baker—an Episcopalian with pacifistic leanings—had recited a litany of reasons why he should not be named Secretary of War, Wilson asked, “Are you ready to take the oath?” There was good reason for Wilson’s urgency.

  Wilson realized his Army was so small that he lacked sufficient manpower even to prevent bandits from crossing the long Mexican border. And a few hours before dawn on March 9, 1916—Secretary Baker’s first day in office—Pancho Villa and an army of 1,500 descended upon the town of Columbus, New Mexico, three miles across the border. While most of the town slept, the Villistas burned buildings, looted stores, and shot at will, killing seventeen Americans, half of whom were soldiers. Two hundred fifty troopers of the 13th United States Cavalry fought back and chased the marauders five miles into Mexican territory, killing seventy-five.

  In fact, the bandits were primitive political operatives, retaliating against Wilson for his recent acceptance of Carranza’s de facto government, which Villa hoped to topple by embarrassing both leaders. Until then, such raids as these allowed him to feed and arm his troops, refueling his own dreams of national leadership. Any account of the fearless peasant challenging the Goliath to the north only enhanced his legend. As he fled back to safety, Villa dropped a stash of personal papers, including what appeared to be his final orders just before the Columbus attack, which revealed his true mission: “Kill all the Gringos.”

  From Fort Sam Houston, Texas, General Frederick Funston wired Secretary Baker that “unless Villa is relentlessly pursued and his forces scattered, he will continue raids.” Even before consulting the Carranza government, Wilson authorized a punitive expedition whose sole objective was the capture of Pancho Villa, dead or alive. He ordered Brigadier General John J. Pershing, a Missouri-born graduate of West Point who had distinguished himself in Cuba and the Philippines, to command this force and secure the United States–Mexico border.

  Wilson never viewed Pershing’s expedition as “an invasion of that Republic nor an infringement of its Sovereignty.” Indeed, its whole idea was “to cooperate with the forces of General Carranza in removing a cause of irritation to both Governments and to retire from Mexico so soon as this object is accomplished.” In an effort to avoid a war with the United States, Carranza agreed to work with the Americans with mutual permission for American and Mexican forces to cross into each other’s territory in pursuit of bandits. While Pershing prepared for his mission, one of Carranza’s Colonels declared that should American troops cross the border, he would immediately attack. Caught in a pickle, Wilson told Tumulty and Secretary Baker that should that case arise, he would not send troops into Mexico—because that would amount to waging an interventionist war against Mexico.

  Many accused the President of timidity, of failing to seize a political opportunity—nationally and internationally. Tumulty argued that if Wilson did not send troops after Villa, he might “just as well not contemplate running for the Presidency, since he would not get a single electoral vote.” When Tumulty found Wilson intractable, he sought out Secretaries Burleson and Houston; and with their input, Tumulty wrote an urgent letter, restating his case—insisting that biding any more time “would be not only disastrous to our party and humiliating to the country, but would be destructive of our influence in international affairs and make it forever impossible to deal in any effective way with Mexican affairs.” Colonel House supported Tumulty, at least in the pages of his diary, saying Wilson’s failure to act would destroy his influence in Europe as well.

  In the meantime, Villa and his men withdrew deeper into the Mexican wilderness, hiding out in the mountainous country. Even though Carranza now considered Villa his rival, it was awkward allying with American soldiers to pursue a lone Mexican. On March 15, General Pershing led almost five thousand men across the border; Secretary Baker even encouraged the use of Curtiss “Jenny” airplanes based in Texas to conduct aerial reconnaissance. By the end of the month, Pershing was hot on Villa’s trail.

  Ambivalence filled the Cabinet Room. By early April, Secretaries Baker and Lansing favored withdrawal of the troops from Mexico; the former thought the mission had been accomplished, that the Villistas had been dispersed to the point of ineffectiveness. Secretary Houston argued that if the troops were withdrawn, Villa would rebound into action. After listening to all their arguments, Wilson believed America must remain in Mexico until Carranza could assume the responsibility for bringing Villa to his knees.

  That would not be any time soon, as Mexicans were calling Carranza a traitor for consenting to the occupation of his country by a foreign army. Although diplomats from both countries had been negotiating for weeks, he would not commit to an agreement because the United States refused to set a withdrawal date for its troops. And then, on June 20, Pershing’s forces encountered resistance in the town of Carrizal—se
venty-five miles into Mexico—when a local commandant announced that he would defy the Americans if they sought entry. An hour of battle left nine Americans dead and twenty-five taken prisoner. “The break seems to have come in Mexico,” Wilson wrote House; “and all my patience seems to have gone for nothing. I am infinitely sad about it. I fear I should have drawn Pershing and his command northward just after it became evident that Villa had slipped through his fingers; but except for that error of judgment (if it was an error) I cannot, in looking back, see where I could have done differently, holding sacred the convictions I hold in this matter.”

  Again, Tumulty insisted upon the President’s taking stronger action. He told Wilson that he should send a message to Carranza saying, “Release those American soldiers or take the consequences.” That, said Tumulty, “would ring around the world.” Wilson sent instead for his private secretary, to whom he delivered a long monologue, trying to explain foreign affairs from his chair in the Oval Office.

  “Tumulty,” he said, “you are Irish, and, therefore, full of fight.” And while Wilson appreciated the depth of Tumulty’s feelings on the Mexican situation, he—not Tumulty and not the Cabinet—had to bear the responsibility for every action to be taken. “I have to sleep with my conscience in these matters,” the President said, “and I shall be held responsible for every drop of blood that may be spent in the enterprise of intervention.” He knew declaring war would be politically advantageous, but Wilson insisted, “There won’t be any war with Mexico if I can prevent it, no matter how loud the gentlemen on the hill yell for it and demand it.”

  “I came from the South and I know what war is,” Wilson reminded Tumulty, “for I have seen its wreckage and terrible ruin.” To those who had never seen such devastation, the President suggested, declarations of war came easily. Wilson could only think of a poor farmer’s boy or the son of a poor widow in a modest town who would have to fight and die. Some American Presidents have seized the first possible opportunity to pull the trigger; speaking of Mexico, but just as surely meaning anywhere in the world, Wilson said, “I will not resort to war . . . until I have exhausted every means to keep out of this mess.”

  Wilson’s lips quivered as he insisted that he would be just as ashamed to be rash as to be a coward. “Valor,” he said, “withholds itself from all small implications and entanglements and waits for the great opportunity when the sword will flash as if it carried the light of heaven upon its blade.” Someday, Wilson said, “the people of America will know why I hesitated to intervene.”

  And then the President revealed an unspoken intricacy of the Mexican situation. Eager for war between Mexico and the United States, Germany had planted propagandists in Mexico to encourage hostilities with its North American neighbor. “She wishes an uninterrupted opportunity to carry on her submarine warfare,” said Wilson, “and thus believes that war with Mexico will keep our hands off her and thus give her liberty of action to do as she pleases on the high seas.” With war appearing “inevitable,” the President said America could not afford to divide its energies or forces, “for we will need every ounce of reserve we have to lick Germany.” Wilson felt he could not yet divulge as much to the American people because they were still at peace with the great power—one, he believed, “whose poisonous propaganda is responsible for the present terrible condition of affairs in Mexico.”

  General Pershing’s troops maintained their search for Pancho Villa, coming closest to their objective when his Lieutenant George S. Patton killed Villa’s second-in-command and received notoriety less for the kill than for his driving back to headquarters with the corpse strapped to the hood of his vehicle. In June 1916, Congress approved a National Defense Act, which expanded the National Guard and created a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. Forty-eight states sent over 100,000 men to the border—which they did not cross. Without capturing Villa, Pershing’s men served mostly as scarecrows at the border, reservists from all walks of life playing soldier for a few months and enjoying their military excursion. For Mexicans—even those who disapproved of Villa—the eleven-month expedition remained an unforgivable incursion. At the same time, some condemned Wilson for going too far in Mexico and not far enough in Europe.

  In dealing with either crisis, Wilson played his cards slowly, hoping each might provide a reasonable opportunity to open some kind of peace negotiations. Mid-February, the German government seemed to do exactly that, issuing a statement that said she had “limited her submarine warfare because of her long-standing friendship with the United States, and because by the sinking of the Lusitania which caused the death of citizens of the United States, the German retaliation affected neutrals, which was not the intention, as retaliation should be confined to enemy subjects.” Viewing that attitude as a peace offering, several members of Congress offered the strongest plan yet for neutrality—which Wilson fought.

  Congressman A. Jefferson McLemore of Texas and Senator T. P. Gore of Oklahoma offered similar resolutions in their respective chambers that would prohibit the issuance of American passports for use on ships of belligerent nations and withdrawing protection of American citizens who persisted in traveling on those ships. Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee William J. Stone of Missouri and a few colleagues visited the White House to discuss this approach, only to encounter a decided lack of support. “You are right in assuming that I shall do everything in my power to keep the United States out of war,” Wilson wrote Stone after their exchange, but just as assuredly he wrote:

  I cannot consent to any abridgement of the rights of American citizens in any respect. The honour and self-respect of the nation is involved. We covet peace, and shall preserve it at any cost but the loss of honour. To forbid our people to exercise their rights for fear we might be called upon to vindicate them would be a deep humiliation indeed.

  Senator Gore sought to give his branch the upper hand in this argument by introducing one resolution after another as a way of making the President keep reaffirming his neutrality. In the end, most Congressional Democrats supported Wilson, tabling the Gore-McLemore Resolution, in all its forms.

  But Germany continued to provoke. On March 24, 1916, a German submarine torpedoed the French steamer Sussex as it was ferrying almost four hundred passengers across the English Channel, from Folkestone to Dieppe. The ship had never been armed, was known for its habitual conveyance of passengers only, and was avoiding routes meant for shipping troops and supplies. Eighty passengers were killed or injured. None was American. It became increasingly difficult for the President to maintain a position of nonintervention with such events continuously occurring. The likes of Theodore Roosevelt never stopped egging Wilson on in the press, criticizing him for neither standing by his demands for “strict accountability” nor adequately preparing the nation for war. American sentiment steadily skewed toward the Allies; but German Americans tended to be anti-English, as did Irish Americans, what with a weeklong rising of Irish republicans against English rule that Easter, an insurrection that would bloom into years of revolution.

  Secretary Lansing urged action, specifically a demand for the immediate recall of Count Johann-Heinrich von Bernstorff, the German Ambassador to Washington, and the severance of diplomatic relations with Germany. “I realize that this action is drastic,” he wrote the President, “but I believe that to be patient longer would be misconstrued both at home and abroad.” Colonel House concurred but feared Wilson would continue to hesitate. “He was afraid,” House wrote in his journal on March 30, “if we broke off relations the war would go on indefinitely and there would be no one to lead the way out.”

  Stronger disagreements raged in Congress, cutting across party lines and creating strange alliances. Leading Republican and interventionist Henry Cabot Lodge sided with Wilson in his stance against Democrats Gore and McLemore; and isolationist Midwestern Republicans, such as Wisconsin’s Robert La Follette, allied with powerful Southern Democrats, suc
h as William Stone and Mississippi’s James K. Vardaman. On April 19, 1916, the President walked through the political minefield of the Capitol to address a joint session of Congress. Without abandoning his position of peace and neutrality, he delivered a solemn sixteen-minute speech devoid of rhetorical flourishes and moved the nation one step closer to war.

  After summarizing the Imperial German government’s maritime practices and policies of the prior fourteen months, Wilson insisted his own government had been “very patient.” At the same time, Wilson said, it had accepted in good faith Germany’s repeated explanations and assurances, despite its continued commitment to “the use of submarines for the destruction of an enemy’s commerce.” Wilson felt the United States was compelled to issue an official warning: “that unless the Imperial German Government should now immediately declare and effect an abandonment of its present methods of warfare against passenger and freight-carrying vessels this government can have no choice but to sever diplomatic relations with the government of the German Empire altogether.”

  America realized the seriousness of the situation—The New York Times dedicated its entire front page to the speech—and so did Germany. On May 4, 1916, the German government responded at last to the American note in a manner designed to save face for both nations. Germany said it was “prepared to do its utmost to confine the operations of war for the rest of its duration to the fighting forces of the belligerents, thereby also insuring the freedom of the seas.” But so long as Great Britain maintained its illegal blockade, Germany said, neutrals could not expect them to restrict the usage of their most formidable weapon. The United States had evidently won this diplomatic battle, as Wilson, once again, averted entry into the war. Colonel House warned Count von Bernstorff that “the least infraction would entail an immediate severance of diplomatic relations,” and Bernstorff said he did not believe any further transgressions would occur. In a world of aggressors, Wilson now insisted that “the peace of society is obtained by force.” Across America his people began arguing such issues as militarism, compulsory military service, and an armament race.